Media literacy promising for anti-smoking education

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Teaching teens to see through
pro-tobacco messages in the media may be better at preventing
youth smoking than just saying no, according to new research.

More kids who began the study at least open to the
possibility of starting to smoke changed their minds after a
media literacy course, compared to kids in a traditional
anti-smoking class, researchers found.

"Standard school-based smoking-prevention programs are just
not as successful as we would like," Dr. Brian Primack said.

Primack, the study's lead author and director of the Program
for Research on Media and Health at the University of Pittsburgh
School of Medicine, said clean air laws and large anti-smoking
campaigns have led to an overall drop in smoking in the U.S.

"But when it comes down to (youth) educational programs, it
just hasn't worked as well as we hoped," he added.

For the new study, he and his colleagues recruited 796
ninth-grade students from three Pittsburgh high schools to
either take a traditional anti-smoking class or the media
literacy program.

The traditional program deals a lot with resisting social
influences, such as peers and parents who smoke, according to
Primack.

The media literacy program, on the other hand, is intended
to teach adolescents to analyze and evaluate the messages
they're encountering in popular culture.

Primack said research has found that the amount of smoking
seen in movies and media is a good predictor of whether people
will smoke.

"That's why people said if the media is so influential,
maybe media literacy at least theoretically could be a good
avenue for intervention," he said.

Primack noted, however, that the two classes share common
themes. "They're not completely 100 percent opposite," he said.

At the start of the study, students were given survey
questions and asked to respond on a scale from "strongly agree"
to "strongly disagree."

In response to a question about their intention smoke, 236
students did not firmly disagree - which the researchers
interpreted as the teens being susceptible to starting to smoke.

Almost a quarter of those susceptible students who were
assigned to the media literacy class said they had changed their
mind about smoking by the end of the program and were firmly
against starting. That compared to about 16 percent among those
taking the traditional anti-smoking class.

Statistically, however, the difference between those groups
could have been due to chance, the researchers note in the
Journal of School Health.

At the end of the study, students in the media literacy
program were more likely than those in the traditional class to
perceive smoking as unpopular. They were also more likely to say
they liked the program and to pay attention in the classes.

"In general, facilitators like doing this type of education
more as well," Primack said.

Cari McCarty, a research associate professor at the
University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital who has
developed prevention programs for kids, said the new study is a
promising start.

McCarty, who was not involved in the new study, also said
there are a lot of advantages to a media literacy approach, such
as the program allowing adolescents to come to conclusions on
their own about what the media is trying to tell them.

"I think we need more and bigger studies to be more
definitive in terms of outcomes of the study," she said.

Primack said he and his team want to look at long-term
outcomes for the adolescents in the programs.

"We need to see if this type of program sticks with people,"
he said, adding that they would also like to examine whether
media literacy is useful at tackling other health behaviors.

McCarty agreed. She said smoking often goes hand in hand
with antisocial behavior and addressing them both would be an
advantage.

"I guess I'm recommending a big-picture approach, because
getting too streamlined can lose other important aspects of the
problem," she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JYFpIG Journal of School Health,
online January 14, 2014.